Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 2 – Anastaya
Mitrofanova, a specialist on church-state relations at Moscow’s Russian
Orthodox University, is calling for legislation that would deprive “titular”
nations of the non-Russian republics of any special rights on their
territories, a move that would effectively suppress these republics even if
their names remained on the map.
Her article last week is a direct
response to efforts by Tatarstan to retain the office of president, something
that is supported by the Moscow-Kazan power sharing agreement but contradicted
by a Russian law specifying that there can be only one president in the Russian
Federation (regions.ru/news/2566269/).
But more than that, it appears to be
an effort to make an end run around the obstacles that had effectively blocked
Vladimir Putin’s regional amalgamation campaign, an effort that has stalled
after eliminating most but not all of the so-called “matryoshka” republics by
combining smaller non-Russian regions with larger and predominantly ethnic
Russian ones.
Mitrofanova writes that “from Soviet
tiems, we have subjects of the Russian Federation which are consider national
and those which are not considered that. For example, Kursk oblast is not a
national subject, but the Republic of Tatarstan is. In addition, there exist
so-called ‘titular nations.’”
“At times, they do not represent
even a majority of the population in the republics, [but] nevertheless, the
leaders of these regions insist on their ‘specialness.’ We are a titular nation
and we must have special rights and privileges … in a democratic state there
cannot be any special rights connected with ethnicity -- except for numerically
small indigenous peoples.”
“I think,” Mitrofanova says, “the
authorities must act much more harshly” against these republics than they have
in the past “because one need not fear ‘the separation of Tatarstan’ as it is
surrounded on all sides by the territory of the Russian Federation and does not
have any external borders.”
But more generally, she continues,
the entire “system of ‘titular ethnoses’ should be done away with.” The elites
in these republics exploit this and thus create “a favorable field for the exacerbation
of ethnic conflicts, against which of course, it is necessary to struggle.”
As it often does when it posts an
article on a controversial issue, the Regions.ru portal has surveyed the
opinion of religious leaders and experts on the question of ending the status
of “titular nation” in the non-Russian republics (regions.ru/news/2566644/). Their
answers may surprise some.
On the one hand, and as expected,
Muslim leaders generally oppose doing away with this status. But on the other,
so too do Russian Orthodox clergy, some because they fear it would destabilize
the country and others because they very much want to see ethnic Russians as
the titular nationality of the country as a whole. Doing away with the status
would make that hard to achieve.
But one of those interviewed, Roman
Silantyev, long notorious for his attacks on Muslim leaders and currently the
executive director of the Human Rights Center of the World Russian Popular Assembly,
is enthusiastically in favor of the idea. And his backing, given his ties to
Patriarch Kirill and the Kremlin suggest that those at the highest levels may
agree.
Silantyev says that he “completely
agrees” with Mitrofanova’s proposal. Any
status for “titular” nations is “a survival of the past from Lenin’s
times. Even Stalin was against special
authority being given to national formations.” And now it is time to shift from
dividing the country along ethnic lines and instead do so on a territorial
basis as was the tsarist empire.
All the federal subjects, he argues,
“should have equal obligations and rights,” so that none of them can argue as
Tatarstan now is that it must have special privileges. And there is an even more important reason
for doing away with “titular” nations as a status: Why should non-Russians have
them but Russians not?
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